


Yi Chang ‹異常›

by kunshi_sekijou



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Future Fic, Lots of it, M/M, Medical Jargon, Nonsense, beta what beta, borderline nonexistent slash, semi-au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 00:26:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6682090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kunshi_sekijou/pseuds/kunshi_sekijou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was his colleague, his acquaintance, his teacher, his patient.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yi Chang ‹異常›

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I guess I totally lied about quitting writing (damn you, Niru-san, Sumiya-san, and Goldfish-san).  
> I drew a lot of inspiration from my environment. So from this point of rebirth on, you can expect to see my stories doing two things. One, titles celebrating my cultural background. Two, contents referring excessively to my profession. And yes, that means you'll be reading a lot of jargon. Enjoy.
> 
> The title "yi chang" means "anomaly." It is an oxymoron, in that "yi" means "unusual or extraordinary" and "chang" means "usual or ordinary."

**[BGM:** Halsey - "Gasoline" (Official Instrumental) **]**

It was a dark and stormy night.

The perfectly overused, clichéd beginning of mystery novels alike.

However, it wasn't dark, nor stormy, nor night, nor was he reading a generic mystery novel. Though, Oshitari Yuushi did have a mystery at hand.

"Chief complaint is altered mental status. He's had a sudden onset of speech difficulties, though not completely dysarthric, and has barriers to coherent communication. CT, EEG results came back within normal limits. Spinal tap results negative. Blood work all normal with the exception of low albumin, pre-albumin, and hemoglobin; no bacterial, fungal or viral infections detected. Vitals, all normal." His associate sighed. "Basically, we've tried ruling out a lot of ailments and anomalies besides minor malnutrition, but we still cannot pinpoint the exact cause of his change in mental status or his lack of responsiveness."

Oshitari nodded in comprehension, long fingers threading through the stack of lab reports, assessment findings, test analysis.

"Oh, and he's not a frequent flyer (1)."

"Okay, I'll be in for consultation." Reading, interpreting, and confirming the data that led to no conclusive results, his eyes darted to the name he's neglected all this time till now. It was a habit of his. Only after receiving report and before his interview with the patient does he slide the patient's name into the temporary, easy to retrieve compartment of his short term memory. For mental space was precious and his mind had already been crammed full of textbook information and pictures of slides and images of cross-sections of biopsies and autopsies. He really didn't want to use it to store names of strangers, labels on case portfolios, useless details to be discarded once patients ditched the hospital.

  
But that stranger's name, that particular label on the case portfolio made him pause today.

He glanced.

He did a double take.

_Yanagi Renji._

  
At first, he dismissed it as a coincidence. After all, names lost their inimitability with the burgeoning of population and parents stressing more about the responsibilities attaching them to their children other than the umbilical chord. Oshitari skimmed the initial admission assessment and basic patient information.

His eyes widened.

And the words fell from his lips as abruptly as a senile senior falling out of bed before the bed alarm could sound.

"No way."

...

As the element of surprise goes, the ‘Yanagi Renji' turned out to be the one he knew. Or rather, he was only acquainted with him. He didn't know the other personally, beyond his former tennis opponent.

“Good morning, Yanagi-kun. How are you feeling today?”

“...” The other sat in silence on the edge of his bed, his back slightly hunched.

“Did you sleep well last night?”

“...”

Yes, acquaintance. He deemed the other's identity as just that after he acknowledged his attempt at small talk, his presence, their supposed acquaintance like he acknowledged the room air.

“I'm going to auscultate your heart and lungs.” He took his silence as consent. While he maneuvered the bell of his stethoscope up and down his back, his chest, he silently assessed his state.

Illness painted his skin, once the color of sun-kissed tan, into porcelain. Blue veins ran like streams and rivers beneath his seemingly thin skin. Red blood cells, deprived of optimal levels of hemoglobin swam in them. The bony prominence of his joints pronounced. His general appearance neat, tidy. Though, his slight gaunt appearance told of his malnutrition.

Even at his dull state, even when he wore nothing but an overwashed, fading hospital gown, Oshitari judged him to be attractive. The image of fragility. The image of a fallen angel.

Oshitari snorted, amused that the romantic in him resurfaced when it should have been bludgeoned by years filled with dry, dragging lectures and impaled by the cold blade of medical theories.

It amused him that the things he thought had met their demise had simply lied dormant.

Oshitari retracted his stethoscope straightening. “I'll come check on your later, Yanagi-kun. Have a wonderful day.”

Standing in front of the computer in the hallway, he hesitated before inputting his order.

_Continue observation._

...

Somehow after spending a large chunk of his shift assisting the short-staffed emergency department reviving three patients with cardiac arrest and two patients experiencing hypoglycemic shock, he remembered to revisit him.

The other called out as he dragged his worn body into his room. Though, he didn't call out to _him._

"Nee-san..." He gasped in an odd, raspy voice. Like he had been possessed by some evil witch. Though, the vulnerability and desperation in his eyes, in his tone of voice made the situation seem like a scene from a drama rather than a horror film.

"Nee-san..." He called again, his opened eyes glassy, transparent like that of an antique doll.

Oshitari closed his eyes, his thumb and middle finger pressed against his temples. If his mind persisted in romanticizing every situation regarding the other like this, he swore he would soon drop out of med school and pursue a career in writing or directing film, like his former tennis team captain.

...

Oshitari soon discovered Yanagi spending much of his time looking out the window of his private room.

When Oshitari started his clinical rounds, he looked out the window a lot too. While he was in the interns' office. While he was in his preceptor's office. While he was at the patients' rooms. While he was strolling down the hallway.

Oshitari spent much time looking out the window, to the image of the outside world, especially enjoying the view from this hospital building. The Ferris wheel in the distance lit up to the colors that existed in every girl's princess fantasy. The condominiums located in the center of convenience overlooking the spectacular view. The grass, the trees, the flowers blossoming all year round, the fountains---everything replacing people's preconceived dark impression of generic hospitals. Everything forming the constellation of freedom at the end of his shift.

Though, it was only with time, with rumination, with maturity that he came to realize that the scene outside the window symbolized different things for the patients and the hospital care staff.

For the patients, the scene outside was the reason for their survival. They needed to get better for the outside world. Specifically, they needed to get better for what, for who, waited outside.

From the delay in Yanagi's recovery, he wondered if the other had anyone waiting for him out there. Or, did he continue staring out the window for so long because he was still searching for that someone, for that something, to recover for?

...

From the sum of his observations over the span of his stay, he concluded that the other had been more comfortable with members of his own gender than the opposite gender.

  
As he strolled by his room, he watched the other clutch onto his bed covers adamantly, wordlessly refusing the caregiver who attempted to convince him to an ablution.

He decided, on this particularly slow day, to extend his generosity. Because doing something would pass time faster than pacing the hallways aimlessly.

Oshitari prepared a small basin of warm water. Pulling the curtains to ensure the other's privacy, he adjusted the height of the bed accordingly (“Save your back!” The caregivers chanted daily). Then, he pushed off the covers to expose his figure. He assessed the other's hot, moist skin, and wondered why he had refused to reveal himself even when he had been sweating profusely.

The hospital gown rode up his thighs. The entirety of the other's long, firm legs tangled before him. If it wasn't for his right lateral recumbent fetal position, he would have gotten a view of his genitalia.

He slipped off the other's hospital gown. In the flow of his actions, the other neither objected nor fought. He lied still, as peaceful and nude as a newborn.

Oshitari reached for the washcloth in the basin and rung it out. Dragging the square cloth across the other's smooth skin, he noted that even in the other's diaphoretic state, he didn't have the stench most of the other patients had.

His medical mind proceeded to a hypothesis. The other's daily diet must have consisted of foods mellow in nature. Majority of which, he speculated, to be vegetables. Many people thought that waste was only expelled through their distal orifice. Yet, their bodies expelled waste through their sweat glands, through their skin as well. Thus, the more harsher the food on the digestive system, the more noxious, the more foul-smelling the odor of the waste produced. Therefore, the sweat, the urine, the stool of an impossibly ill patient was most fetid.

As he continued running the towel down the stretch of Yanagi's skin, he noted his infinitesimal pores. The fleshy pink nubs of skin at his chest. His concave umbilicus.

  
He flipped him over with a nudge. The other cooperated; his passive silence, consent. When the other turned to lie supine, his hands moved to cover his groin area with the last trace of humility.

Oshitari paused. A moment later, he finally reached out to push the other's hands away gently. He rolled up a new wet washcloth and ran it down the other's limp member. This was a tender and sensitive area. He took much care washing, almost as if he caressed the delicate layer of skin.

After being in medical school for so long, there were some things that came naturally. Under the hellish training, his mind instinctively drew quick conclusions from his visual assessments. As easily as he performed his Higuma Otoshi during junior high school tennis days.

The member he supported in his palm was as slender as the figure it's connected to. Its light pink shade, absent of dark melanin, ruled out its use beyond its primary function of waste excretion. The absence of flabbiness or flaccitidy with tactile stimulus translated to its proper functioning.

Oshitari breathed, exhaling a breath he didn't know he was holding. He quickened the pace of his cleaning and donned the other in a clean gown before tucking him under a new set of covers.

Ensuring that he had not left any potential hazards, he exited the room. The setting orange sun he caught outside the window, the perfect proof of the time he cleaved successfully from his shift due to the chore.

Oshitari continued his rounding. In the back of his mind, he wondered how caregivers accomplished such intimate tasks without feeling awkward.

Well, that must be the difference between doctors and caregivers.

...

Visiting the other became routine. When he questioned his own actions, Oshitari dismissed it as a humanly instinctive, psychological attachment to familiarity. Seeing Yanagi everyday reassured him, allowed him to thrived in this otherwise unfamiliar milieu.

Before the change of shift the next day, he wandered by the other's room again.

From the dimmed environment, he knew the other had gone to bed at an earlier hour than the other patients. Though, his motionless waking moments didn't differ much from when he slept.

He approached his bedside. From the way the side rails stood framing the sides of his bed, Oshitari was held under the illusion the other had regressed to his infant self now slumbering in his cradle.

"You need to be better." Oshitari told his sleeping figure. He must be out of his mind thinking his words would reach to his sleeping ears when they hadn't gotten through to him in his sobriety. "You need to get well. Real soon. Or else, they're going to send you off to somewhere you don't belong. And getting out of that mess is going to be harder than getting out of here."

Because of the psych facility's relationship to the hospital, because of their affiliations, he really wasn't supposed to deter a patient's transfer there. After all, when you're a part of a company, it's corporate interest above client interest. That was the clandestine objective.

...

Report of the other's spontaneous recovery came as unexpected as his admission.

Six days after Yanagi Renji's admission, Oshitari arrived to make his rounds as usual. When his associates told him the other was good to be discharged tomorrow, he almost thought the topic of their discussion had been regarding another patient instead.

Oshitari decided that he needed to see the other's miraculous recovery himself.

The other sat on a reclining chair at the corner of the room beside the window. The morning sunlight slipped through each row of the window blinds and lit up Yanagi's figure, once saturated with the dimness of the gloomy setting. Presently, he had his attention directly fully at the book at hand. Oshitari recognized that book surprisingly. It was the same book assigned to him as supplement reading to his clinical studies.

He approached him.

Without looking up from his current page, Yanagi started. "'How did you recover so fast?' That's what you wanted to say."

Oshitari found his voice fast, immediately, after the other shocked him again. "So enlighten me. Were you ever..."

"Was I ever sick in the first place? The answer is, no." His confession came like the telltale sign that pointed directly at a patient's disease. The bull's eye rash to Lyme disease. "And your next question must inevitably be why I did what I did."

It was no question. It was a sure statement.

Oshitari's mouth hung agape. He closed it quickly and dragged a visitor's chair up to the recliner. Sitting, he cleared his throat and managed. "So what's your story?"

  
Saving his page, Yanagi closed the book with a deliberate slowness and set it aside on the adjustable bedside table.

"You will not know what being a true doctor, a true health care provider, means, until you, yourself, have become a patient." Yanagi said quietly. If Oshitari hadn't met him before, hadn't been acquainted with him before, he would have thought that the one speaking to him now was the other's twin. Or something.

Yanagi continued. "A patient's shame, anger, frustration, struggle, despair... Medical school teaches those through words, but those feelings only become real, tangible, until you experience them yourself."

When a content smile finally cracked the grim line between his lips, Oshitari knew he was finally starting to accept the other as he remembered him. "Before my small experiment here, I was like you too, Oshitari-kun. Head crammed with textbook information, medical jargon, pharmacological pathways. Rounding the patients' rooms every day..."

"Going through those motions feels like being submersed in a tub of bleach---what was suppose to purge you from bacterial infestations ends up stripping off the entirety of your skin." Oshitari agreed. When Yanagi peered over to him in wonder, he only shrugged. "Excuse the graphic description, but that's how I feel."

Yanagi's lips turned upward knowingly. "It might as well be as you have analogized. Then, one day, a patient presented with an altered mental status. The tests all came back normal. So we deduced that it was not anything physiological that caused her mental abnormality. My colleagues and I eventually wrote her off to a psych facility. Yet, till this day, I can't help but wonder about that decision. There are mysteries in medicine that men have yet to solve. Writing off a patient so rashly is a just of way of saying that we have capitulated to mystery, to the possibility of evolution, is it not?"

"Or maybe, her problem was simply a psychological one. I think I would have kept my options open if I had more time, and less patients to treat." Oshitari responded. "After having this conversation with you, Yanagi-kun, I don't think I can ever be a psychiatrist. I wouldn't be able to tell if a patient is mentally ill or not. Just like I couldn't tell whether you were actually sick or not."

"It's true, sometimes the line between reality and fantasy is blurry." Yanagi agreed. Then, he turned to him, revealing his amber eyes, full of mischief that contradicted his propriety. "What is to prove that I am no longer ill? That my sudden onset of clarity is but a scheme for getting discharged?"

His finger pushed up his glasses at the bridge of his nose. "Well, Yanagi-kun, it is hard to say, subjectively. I am only an intern. But, objectively speaking, all your lab results returned within normal range. So you'd better declare yourself recovered, or I would have no choice but to sign you into a psych facility."

Yanagi smirked. "I think I'll pass."

...

That same day, Oshitari Yuushi signed Yanagi Renji's discharge order.

He should have been rounding, reading his patients' charts, trying to figure out just what the hell is wrong with them. But instead, he's here, watching the other scavenger the belongings that found refuge in the closet and bedside table drawers.

"What made you so obdurate about my wellness? Why did you think it was absolutely necessary for me to recover and return to my optimal state?" Yanagi asked suddenly. The way he sustained his packing made his inquiry sound rather casual. "Don't tell me it was your guilty conscience or something. You and I both know that we've signed sane patients into psych facilities as if a pack of hungry wolves had devoured our morality."

Oshitari took a seat next to him on the bed. He remained silent. And for once, his silence wasn't a pretense he put up as he churned truths in his head in sugar lies.

"It was probably my denial. Denying your image as the sick patient. Because in my mind, you've always been the image of propriety, of self-possession, of stability. Illness just doesn't suit you." He admitted.

"Well then," he said coolly. "Let that be a lesson. That when patients are admitted into the hospital and fall under the influence of medication and treatment regimens that they eventually lose sense of themselves, we shall be the ones to remember them in their healthy state. Let us be the ones to believe in their recovery. That they will eventually return to wellness, as simply as a wanderer returning home after his pilgrimage."

"Before you go," Oshitari rose, casually plunging his hands into the side pockets of his white coat. "Why did you choose this hospital?"

"You didn't really expect me to sign myself into a psych ward, did you?"

Oshitari chuckled. "It would have taken a lot more to get yourself out of that one."

Yanagi shrugged. "But in all seriousness, I wanted to do this where less people knew me. The act is more convincing where people don't know you."

With a raised eyebrow, Oshitari suggested. "I bet you never expected to see me here."

Yanagi went along with his sarcasm. "Yes, you were quite the pleasant surprise."

"Well, since you're setting off, I had better get back to work." Oshitari straightened from leaning against the wall. He stopped on his tracks as if he had forgotten something and craned his neck and let his breath tickle the other's ear. "It must have been hard to keep up the act when someone's providing your perineal care."

He pulled away. Yanagi gathered his belongings as if he never teased him. But Oshitari's sharp eyes spotted his ears glowing red from embarrassment.

Yanagi cleared his throat. "Oh, and before I forget..."

Oshitari lifted a brow waiting for what followed; he was as suspicious of the other's words as much as he was incredulous of the other's forgetfulness.

"Courtesy has nothing to do with this declaration, but, I think you will be a good doctor." He smiled, his action as genuine as his words. "A good, empathetic, reasonable doctor."

Hearing it from a patient is one thing, and hearing it from a colleague, another. But to hear it from someone who had been both his patient and colleague trying to establish himself in the same field had the effect of boosting his ego.

With one corner of his lips lifted, he waved. "Take care, see you never."

"Aa." Yanagi waved back.

It was probably the best farewell anyone could ever bid you when you're discharged from the hospital.

**Author's Note:**

> (1) A patient who returns to his health care provider for everything, even when there is nothing particularly wrong.


End file.
